Behaviour Change

PROPAGANDA FOR CHANGE is a project created by the students of Behaviour Change (ps359) and Professor Thomas Hills at the Psychology Department of the University of Warwick. This work was supported by funding from Warwick's Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning.

Monday, March 13, 2017

#ItIsYourFuture - 'Cos Alzheimer's Disease can affect any one of us

THE ISSUE

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common
form of dementia, and at 84,767 deaths a year, you’re almost as likely to die
from Alzheimer’s as you are from a stroke. This year, 225,000 will develop
dementia – this is one every three minutes – and this number is predicted to
rise to 115.5 million by 2050. Moreover, the devastating disease affects
sufferers’ families – two thirds of the cost of dementia is paid by people with
dementia and by their families (Alzheimer’s Association, 2016).

Currently, Alzheimer’s has no cure, but
treatments to temporarily slow the effects of the disease are available.
However, with the help of donations scientific research can inform and improve treatments
and a cure might be found. Delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s by five years
would halve the number of deaths from the condition, saving 30,000 lives per
year.

THE PROJECT

The aim of our project was to raise
awareness of the negative consequences of Alzheimer’s Disease and to encourage
individuals to actively participate in spreading awareness and to donate to
Alzheimer’s Research. The persuasive content message was that Alzheimer’s
disease can affect any one of us in the future and therefore we must act now
and invest in our futures while we are young. Our targeted audience was young
adults and through the use of social media, we were able to easily communicate
and educate this cohort in an interactive and fun way.

We launched a Facebook Page called
“Growing Old Gracefully” where we encouraged people to use a face-aging app to
actively get involved and send in their own photos of their aged-selves along
with an interesting fact they’d found about Alzheimer’s Disease. To further
educate our followers on the prevalence and consequences of Alzheimer’s
disease, we also shared videos and articles from other Alzheimer’s related
pages. Our page was public, therefore anyone with an active Facebook account
could view and invite others to like and follow the page. Once you have
liked/followed the page, you would get notifications every time something new
was posted. Therefore more posts meant more frequent reminders to get involved
as well as further exaggerating the importance of the issue. We introduced the
hashtag: #ItIsYourFuture as our unique slogan, ending each post with the
hashtag. This acted as a reminder and further enforced our persuasive content
message. Our targeted behaviour was the active participation through
liking/following our page, posting an aged photo or donating to Alzheimer’s
Research UK.

Figure1: Facebook page

To further spread awareness we targeted
a second social media platform creating an Instagram account called
“G.O.Gracefully”. This additional medium was also public and further increased
our exposure. On here, we posted the aged images and provided links to promote
our Facebook page. We follow and are followed by dementia related accounts,
allowing our project to reach broader communities.

Figure 2: Instagram account

RESULTS/OUTCOME

As opposed to just launching an
informative campaign, we encouraged active participation and built a community
to spread awareness. Because young adults today are increasingly dependent on
technology and are always on their phones and on the Internet, social media has
been an effective way of reaching the targeted audience and we are seeing great
success with this project.

Facebook

Our Facebook page has 122 likes, 118
followers and the highest number of people reached on a single post is 672
people. Our posts have been liked by large networks, such as ‘BBC South Today’
and we have received visitor posts including a post by ‘Consumerwatchfoundation’.

Figure 3: BBC South Today

Figure 4: ‘Consumerwatchfoundation’Visitor post

Instagram

We currently have 330 followers on
Instagram and our most liked photo has 47likes. We are followed by over 30 Alzheimer’s/Dementia/Homecare
related accounts and individuals who have family members/relatives currently
battling the disease. Through this platform, organisations and individuals have
contacted us to commend us on our work and our initiative. A direct message
from @alzheimers_inspiration said; “Thank you for being an Alzheimer’s Disease
advocate!”.

Figure 5: Direct message from @alzheimers_inspiration

WHY

Future Self-continuity Hypothesis

Future self-continuity is the feeling of
identity stability and psychological connectedness to one’s future self
(Hershfield, Garton, Ballard, Samanez-Larkin & Knutson, 2009). This
connection influences your decision-making. If you’re not connected to your
future self, you see your future self as a different person and are less likely
to invest in your future and make choices that benefit you in the long run. Hershfield,
Wimmer & Knutson (2009) found that the same neural patterns are activated
when you think about your future self and when you think about a stranger. Bartels,
Urminsky & Rips (2010) found that self-continuity decreases the further the
distance between your present and future selves.

Future-Orientated Behaviour

Hershfield et al. (2009) proposed that increased
self-continuity can promote future-orientated behaviour such as saving. Self-continuity
can be increased by viewing age-progressed renderings of the future self
(Hershfield, Goldstein, Sharpe, Fox, Yeykelis, Carstensen & Bailenson’s,
2011). When participants viewed an aged-photograph of themselves they displayed
increased saving behaviour compared to participants who viewed a photograph of
their current selves. Moreover, when participants could interact with
photo-realistic age-progressed renderings of themselves through immersive
virtual reality hardware, they allocated 2 times as much money towards their
retirement account. Increased self-continuity and identification with your
future self leads to greater allocation of resources for the future.

Our approach

Donating to Alzheimer’s research is choosing
to invest money in a long-term reward as opposed to an immediate one. Young
adults are less likely to choose to contribute and donate to Alzheimer’s
research because they are less connected to their future selves. They perceive
their older selves suffering with dementia in the same way they perceive a
stranger suffering with the disease.

Our project increased self-continuity
and psychological connectedness through providing individuals with a visual
representation of their future aged selves (using the aging booth app). We
hoped to find an increase in future-orientated behaviour – i.e. greater
donations towards Alzheimer’s research. We asked individuals to also post an
interesting/surprising fact about Alzheimer’s along with their photo to further
exaggerate the consequences of Alzheimer’s disease and emphasize the value of
future rewards. This provides a link to the idea that your future self will
either benefit or suffer based on your choice to donate or not.

FURTHER
PERSUASIVE TECHNIQUES

Foot-in-the door

This technique involves getting someone
to agree to a small initial request, followed by increasingly larger requests, until
the individual is far more invested and committed than they initially intended.
This is more effective than starting out with the desired level of full-blown
commitment as the individual is more likely to agree willingly to a larger
request if it’s gradually implemented (Freedman & Fraser, 1966).

In our project we used this through
initially asking friends and family for a photo of themselves using the aging
booth app. This small initial request became a larger commitment as the
person’s aged face was now tied to a fact about Alzheimer’s that was publicly
accessible to anyone using Facebook. The person’s commitment to our cause of
educating young people about Alzheimer’s was escalated and would make them more
likely to agree to larger requests from us, such as donating to an Alzheimer’s
charity.

Social Proof

Once our following and number of posts
began to increase, social proof came into play. This is the phenomenon that
when we are unsure of what to do, we turn to the views of others to decide what
is acceptable and expected; what others are doing influences your own beliefs
and behaviour. Research shows that three people is enough to create a
‘majority’ view that others are more likely to conform to (Asch, 1955).

Across our Instagram and Facebook page
we posted a total of 20 different aged faces. Based on the research, this is
more than enough to give the impression that most people support research into
Alzheimer’s Disease, encouraging others to conform to the group behaviour and
support the cause. This is evident from our project as our Facebook page
following increased with the more aged photos we posted.

Figure 6: Cover photo & Hashtag

Availability Heuristic

The availability heuristic suggests that
people judge the frequency of an event and its importance with the ‘ease with
which instances come to mind’ (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973; Kahneman, 2011). Through
regularly posting pictures with facts on both our Facebook page and Instagram,
we gave our followers constant notifications and reminders of our presence.

Firstly, through repeating the same
message with the use of our hashtag, #ItIsYourFuture, we engrained the message
into people’s memories. This made retrieval of the message easy and should
therefore result in people considering it to be important and relevant. The
more cognitive ease in accessing information, the more likely people are to
believe it occurs regularly and is an important topic. Secondly, through
posting often we regularly placed Alzheimer’s Disease at the forefront of
people’s minds. People find it easier to retrieve information they’ve seen
recently, causing them to perceive this information as important. This is known
as the recency effect. A study by Schwartz et al (1991) demonstrated this
effect as people rated themselves more assertive if they easily retrieved 6
instances in which they were assertive, as opposed to the more difficult task
of retrieving 12 instances.

Figure 7: Notification to all followers whenever we
post/share a link

CONCLUSION

To conclude, Alzheimer’s
is a devastating disease both for sufferers and their families, and we are
proud to have had the chance to promote it. With enough funding Alzheimer’s
Research UK is committed to spending at least £150 million over the next 10
years on research (Alzheimer’s Association, 2016). We hope that the young
continue to raise awareness towards this worthy cause and see it as an
investment in their own futures because Alzheimer’s can affect any one of us. Everyone
must act now, before we do too little too late. #ItIsYourFuture